Various visioning and advanced drivers assistance systems of today's vehicle use and rely on images and image streams generated by various sources. Drivers for instance react on displayed information based on captured image data or automated systems initiate reactions in response to automated image recognition based on the captured image data. Hence, such image data represents safety relevant information. Nevertheless, image data represents safety relevant information not only in the automotive field but also in further fields of use including for instance transportation field in general, controlling of remote application, supervision of industrial production processes and medical equipment, to name only a non-limiting list of examples.
Those skilled in the art are aware, that functional safety is a primary issue when relying on safety relevant information for controlling an apparatus, to which the safety relevant information relates and the control of which requires an adequate reaction in response to the safety relevant information.
Safety relevant or safety related information represents information, an erroneous content of which might be directly responsible for death, injury or occupational illness, or the erroneous content of which may be the basis for decisions relied on, which might cause death, injury, other significant harms or other significant actions. Safety relevant or safety related information may be the output of safety critical application typically operated in a safety critical environment, which is one in which a computer software activity (process, functions, etc.) whose errors, such as inadvertent or unauthorized occurrences, failure to occur when required, erroneous values, or undetected hardware failures can result in a potential hazard, or loss of predictability of system outcome.
Accordingly, there is an immanent and ongoing need for verification of the integrity of image data subjected to processing operations in an image data processing chain. In particular, the integrity verification is a need when the image data processed by the image data processing chain comprises safety related image data.